Shoigu proposed building three to five large cities in Siberia and moving the capital of Russia there

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu proposed building three to five cities in Siberia with a population of up to one million people and moving the capital of Russia there. He stated this at a meeting with the scientific community of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk.

We need to build three, or better yet five, large centers of scientific, industrial, economic centers in Siberia, in other words, cities with a population of 300-500 thousand, better - up to a million people. And it’s not just to build a city and move the capital here, but to make them very specifically aimed at one or another area of ​​activity.

As an example, Shoigu cited plans that existed before the collapse of the USSR. “Unfortunately, for known reasons the project was stopped,” the minister said.

As Kommersant reports , at the meeting Shoigu also expressed regret that it is impossible to create such large projects in Russia as Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Krasnoyarsk and Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power stations, and the Baikal-Amur Mainline. “Remember how sincerely people went to all these construction sites,” the minister noted.

• Sergei Shoigu, a native of Tuva, already proposed in 2012 to move the capital of Russia to Siberia. “In general, in a good way, many people talk about this, and I’m probably one of them. I believe that we need to move the capital somewhere further, to Siberia. It seems so to me,” he said. Shoigu explained that this would stop the outflow of people from the eastern regions of Russia. Then he did not say which city could become the new capital.
• In Russia, proposals have been repeatedly made to move the capital to Siberia and to move a number of government structures from Moscow to other cities. The first such move was carried out by the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, which has been located in St. Petersburg since 2008. It was also planned that the Supreme Court would move to St. Petersburg, but this process was postponed .
• In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he considered it right to move part of the federal authorities to Siberia. “Let’s say Krasnoyarsk is a suitable place, in my opinion, for this,” Putin noted.
• On a direct line in 2021, Putin said that moving the Russian government to Omsk would not solve the problems of the region, but he admitted that it would be worth moving certain federal structures or offices of large companies from Moscow to Siberia.